Weirdo Company: Volume 2 is now available!

The second volume of Weirdo Company chapters is now available in print. Buy it here from Amazon.com.

After the dragon incident in Boston, Lt. Paul Harper and his squad are taken off active duty. When another team runs into trouble in Mexico, Harper defies orders and leads his team into action. On the run, without support, the team gets closer to cracking the enemy plan that threatens to unleash an unstoppable army of evil upon the world. But a spy within their ranks might end all hope of saving our world...

Unleash the Hellshark! ...Also, tweets

Here it is, ladies and gentlemen, the third part of the Weirdo Company serial - Hellshark.

Having a personal crisis after the events in Britain, Becky Davis returns home to Florida to consider her future. But no sooner has she arrived than she finds herself thrust into a new adventure: The locals are being terrorized by a massive, bloodthirsty shark that can spit fire! 

With the team still scattered, Davis calls on her only backup - team leader Lt. Paul Harper and pilot Colin 'Rhymes' McCollin - for help. But Weirdo Company are not the only ones hunting this hellshark...

Hellshark is available now for your Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble NOOK.

In other news, Star Trek novelist Dayton Ward tweeted me the other day to say nice job on my Strange New Worlds story from 2006.  That's pretty awesome! Kind of made my day, since everything else that was going on had to do with Hurricane Sandy.  Luckily, Boston was mostly spared, and I was safe.  I have a few friends who lost power, but nothing major.  Unfortunately, it looks like New York and other nearby areas were hit pretty hard, so I'm hoping those people get the help they need. 

Current Soundtrack

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country by Cliff Eidelman

'Ninja Werewolf Assassins!' and 'Hellshark' updates

For some reason, my posts announcing the release of Ninja Werewolf Assasins didn't actually... post.  Unfortunately, I was posting remotely and didn't bother to check if the posts actually went up, and well, they didn't.

So here I am, looking kinda dumb with a blog that hasn't been updated in over a month.  Awesome.

Anyway, Ninja Werewolf Assassins! is out now!  You can get it for your Amazon Kindle or Barnes & Noble Nook.

My other update to share is that the third story in the "Weirdo Company" series, Hellshark, is moving along nicely.  I've mocked up the cover art for it, but it's a long way from finished.

I'll also be giving away a few copies of Zombies vs Unicorns this weekend in honor of World Zombie Day.

Current Soundtrack
The Expendables 2 by Brian Tyler

ZvsU, now on Amazon!

ZOMBIES vs UNICORNS

is now available on Amazon:

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.de

Amazon.fr

Amazon.es

Amazon.it

"They are the US military's special response unit for monsters and other creepy-crawly creatures that go bump in the night. They are Weirdo Company. Lead by Lt. Paul Harper, the team embarks on a mission uncomfortably close to home: Contact has been lost with a small farming town in the northeastern United States. What the team finds there will set them up for the fight of their lives, as the townspeople have been turned into vicious, bloodthirsty zombies.
But Harper and his team, including a green new recruit Davis, will discover that there is far more danger in this town than just zombies. Because if the people have mutated into something grotesque and dangerous, what has happened to the farm animals?

"Zombies vs Unicorns" is the first story in the 'Weirdo Company' series and features thrilling, summer blockbuster-style zombie-killing action and a few fun surprises."

The zombies are coming

Tonight, despite being massively sick, I managed to sit down and finish "Weirdo Company: Zombies vs Unicorns," the first in a new short story series.  It's silly, gory fun.  If you like zombies, you'll probably dig it.  If you like explosions and summer blockbuster-style action, you'll probably dig it.  If you like unicorns, you'll probably hate me forever.

Here's the cover I eventually settled on.  It's a bit simpler than I envisioned, but, deadlines are deadlines.

I'll have the links up as soon as the book goes live.  I can't wait to hear what people think of it.

A treasure trove of old material

Recently while on the search for something else, I discovered a large treasure trove of old files that include a bunch of writing from the last decade.  Most of it isn't publishable, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is copyright issues - several of the stories I found were submissions I made to the "Strange New Worlds" anthology that didn't get picked.

While I won't be able to release these stories for sale on Amazon, I do plan on putting them here.

But the biggest discovery was that I found the original version of "The Box".  As you'll recall, the whole reason I rewrote the story and released it via KDP Select was because I couldn't find the original to include in "Show Me the End of the World." Reading the story last night, I was pretty surprised to find just how different it is from the second version.  But, if you've read "The Box," what's interesting is that the premise of the story actually allows the two stories to co-exist.  I'm not sure what to do with this old version now that I've found it.  I half gave a thought to packaging it with the new one, but that doesn't seem fair to the hundreds who've already downloaded that.

More than likely, what I'll do is include it as a bonus in my next collection, which I'm already working on in addition to my novel.

Current TV:
'Star Wars: The Clone Wars' Season 3 [blu-ray]

A couple more reviews

...This time for 'The Box' -

First up is a four-star review here:

"What I liked: Great build-up of suspense. Writing was polished and flowed nicely. It was a fast read and even though I was sort of resisting getting pulled in completely, it made me keep reading until the very end. I think that's the definition of a page turner. Very good pacing.What I liked less: kind of a cliched set-up; group of diverse people called to a lab somewhere to combine their diverse talents. The characters made the switch from investigating the cube to picking up weapons a bit too easily.

Overall, if you don't mind paying .99 for a short story and you like fast flowing adventure, you could do a lot worse than this. It won't be the best thing you've ever read, but definitely worthy of 4 stars.

And next a five-star review here:

"I found this very entertaining. Great character depth, not too much nor too little, which meant I just had to keep reading.
The twists certainly kept me guessing even right up to the last few paragraphs. And the ending was very clever and very unexpected."

Needless to say, I am excited to see these. Since doing the KDP Select free promo, wherein I gave away some 217 copies of "The Box," I've noticed a steady trickle of actual sales happening.


And that put a much-needed smile on my face the last few days.


Current Soundtrack:
'Star Trek' by Michael Giacchino

The Amazon KDP Select Experiment: Phase 1

As I've previously posted, I enrolled "The Box" in Amazon's new KDP Select program.  Now, what this means is two things:

Firstly, that it is exclusive to Amazon - I can't sell "The Box" on any other store, which is fine.  To be honest, most of my sales of "Show Me the End of the World" came from Amazon anyway.  I might have sold four or five copies for the Barnes and Noble Nook, but for the most part, Amazon was where it was going.  Since I only had the one book, I was reluctant to give Select a chance, and some of the conflicting stories I've heard about it made me wary.

Secondly, and here's where the meat of Select comes into play, I am allowed to give "The Box" away for free for five days.  And here's why people are saying that Select is a bad idea if you've only got one book: If you give it away for free, you're not getting any money.  I've read accounts from other indie authors who say that they've given away the first book of a series in order to promote sales of the subsequent books.

Now, if I were to give away "Show Me the End of the World" for free before I had released anything else, my promotion is doing nothing but giving away free books.  Maybe some of those people would remember me and check back later to see if I have anything new coming out, but that seems unlikely.  More likely, I'd simply have given away a bunch of books and gotten nothing in return for it - and I don't even mean just money.  Will those readers turn into fans?  Again, probably not because I have nothing else to offer them and they'll forget about me and move on.

So I enrolled "The Box" in Select because I figured, now I have something out there to offer and the risk is somewhat minimal.  So I can give away "The Box" for free in the hopes that people will like it and seek out and purchase "Show Me the End of the World" as a result.  At least, that's the thinking behind it. I've seen stories of people who have found success in this method, and others who think it's one of the worst mistakes they've ever done as an author.

I'm not ready to declare anything like that at the moment.  Right now, I'm sort of laughing at myself because for the week or so that I offered "The Box" for a mere 99 cents (it is, after all, just one short story, maybe even the low end of novella but that seems like I'm stretching) I sold about six copies.  Now, because the list price is so small, I only make about 35 cents royalty on each one of those.  I don't get the whole dollar, not by a longshot.  But I put some advertisement out there... I put links on my personal Facebook page, on my Olympus Mans page, on Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and Goodreads that I was doing this promo.  And then when the time came and the book was live for free, I put the links out there again and asked people to share it around.

So in over a week I'd sold six copies of my 99 cent story and made a grand total of about two bucks.  In 12 hours, I gave away over 100 copies (about $30 that will not go into my pocket).  At this point, "The Box" has given away more free copies than I sold of "Show Me the End of the World" in total.  Am I happy about that fact?  Eh.  Like I said, this is a promotion.  The whole idea is that I'm trying to build an audience, that this audience will hopefully enjoy "The Box" so much that they'll go buy my other book.

Has that happened? Actually, yes.  According to the sales reports, while at this moment I've given away over 100 copies of "The Box" someone did, in fact, purchase "Show Me the End of the World" today.

Obviously, I'll need more time to look into how this whole thing will work out.  For the moment, I'm a little impressed that I managed to give away so many copies.  I hope everyone who reads it will enjoy it, and I hope that I get some fans and some feedback.  "The Box" was, after all, sort of a holdover from "Show Me" anyway, even though I think I got a little more attached to it than I thought I would.

So if you're reading this, and you've read "The Box", please sound off on your thoughts in the comments.  And if you're feeling really generous, rate it on Amazon.  I'd love to get some gold stars up on that page.

Current Soundtrack:
"X-Men: First Class" by Henry Jackman

Free! Free!

That's right, folks - Everyone's favorite word!  Today (April 4, 2012) and tomorrow (April 5, 2012) my new short story "The Box" is free for everyone on Amazon.com.  Feel free to download it to your Kindle, iPhone, iPad, Android device, PC, Mac, read it right on your fancy-schmancy Internet browser, or... I guess you could print it out if you feel like putting too much effort into something.

But it's free!  So do whatever you like!  Read it, share it, tell all your friends and family how freaking awesome I am... :)

But above all, enjoy.

Current Soundtrack
"John Carter" by Michael Giacchino

What's inside 'The Box'?

The Box

A mysterious artifact is uncovered in the desert. It is metallic, perfectly cubical, covered in strange writing... and older than human civilization. Four strangers are brought to a secret laboratory to unlock its secrets, including a codebreaker, a linguist, and a young prodigy physicist. What is the box? What secrets does it contain within? Finding out will send the team on the greatest adventure of their lives... and could mean the end of everything they know.

"The Box" is now available, exclusively on Amazon!  I have to admit that after uploading yesterday, I pretty much checked the status of it compulsively until it went live.  Amazon takes a few hours for ebooks to go on sale once they've been uploaded, and I was being my usual impatient self.  It finally appeared on the site at about 7 pm, and I immediately shared it across all my usual networks (I'm heavily into Facebook and Google+, so be sure to 'like' me on Olympus Mans and circle me on G+).  

Then, of course, I couldn't get to sleep last night.  Too excited.  It's a blast seeing your name on something that's for sale on a huge site like Amazon.  I'm not sure that'll ever become old hat for me.  At least, I hope it doesn't.


Now, about that novel...

Pushing the button

Well, that's that - I uploaded 'The Box' to Amazon today, and enrolled it in their KDP Select program.  As soon as it's live on the site, I'll be posting links and updating the My Books page.  But mostly what I want to say in this post is that it feels good to hit that button.

When you get to the point where you know that continuing to work on something you're just spinning your wheels and overdoing things.  There's that saying that art is never finished, just abandoned - and there is truth to that.  At some point, you just say, 'Alright, it's time to get this out there.'  And that's just what I did today.

And it feels awesome.

Current Soundtrack
"Amaryllis" by Shinedown

The Editing Phase

So as you may know from previous posts, I've been working on a new story that I'm rewriting from an old one.  It's called "The Box."

Wellllll it's pretty well done.  Clocking in at just under 16,000 words, I'm steadily going through it now making sure all the i's are dotted, all the t's crossed.  I've had a couple people read through it and got some positive feedback on that end, as well.

On that note, I'd like to mention that editing a document in real-time with another person on Google Docs is pretty awesome.

But this story is nearing the finish line.  I can't wait to get it out there.

Current Soundtrack
"Tomorrow Never Dies" by David Arnold

Decisions to be made

You'll recall in a previous posting I mentioned that I was rewriting a lost story that didn't make it into "Show Me the End of the World" called "The Box.  Well not only have I been rewriting it, but I've also expanded upon it.  From my admittedly spotty memory, the story wasn't all that long.  But the new version I'm writing is actually quite a bit longer than I remember the original being.

Whether this makes it better or not, I can't be certain.  It might suck. I'm gonna have a couple people read it and give me some feedback on this one, I think.  I'm not sure why I'm so uncertain of it.  My usual rule is that if it's fun to write, then it's fun to read.  This one is fun to write, but for some reason I get the impression it might not be that fun to read.  Maybe it's the length?  Maybe parts of it feel kind of repetitive?  I won't know until I get some people to take a look at it and tell me what they think.

But because it's turned into a bit of a longer project, it's sort of usurped my novel that I was working on, so that will be delayed a bit.  That's totally fine, of course, because I don't want to rush that, nor do I want to demand that my friends and family who just shelled out their hard-earned cash for "Show Me the End of the World" to do so again just a couple months later.  No, the novel will take time and patience and preparation (but, y'know, I've already nearly finished a cover for it...)

I will, however, put "The Box" up on Amazon for the Kindle.  I might even enroll it in the KDP Select program, which requires that it be exclusive to Amazon for 90 days, but gives it some greater promotional push.  "The Box" was supposed to be a short story; honestly I think it'll end up being more of a novella.

Current Soundtrack

"Battle: Los Angeles" - Brian Tyler

The Lost Tale

When I was putting together the stories for "Show Me the End of the World," there was one story I'd written a few years ago that I knew I wanted to include.  It had the ultra lame title "The Box" but I was really proud of it.

In terms of its themes, it was very close to a lot of the other stories in "Show Me," in that it had a rather "Twilight Zone"-ish sort of ending.  It had a little bit of action, and what I thought was a pretty nifty hook to it. 

So, of course, as luck would have it, I could not find this story anywhere.  I'm sure there's a copy of it on some hard drive packed away in my closet (of which there are several) but I couldn't find it anywhere in my email, and it predated my extensive use of Google Docs.

Since I wasn't willing to start digging through old drives, and I had given myself a pretty hard deadline for getting the book out, I made the decision to just leave it behind on this one.

But it bothered me.

 I liked the story!  I really did!  Or, at least, I remember liking it.  Since I don't have it to re-read, all I have is that memory.  But what to do? 

The obvious answer, of course, is to go digging through--

Nope.  I decided to re-write the story from scratch.  I started last night, and I'm probably about a quarter of the way through.  I haven't decided what to do with it when I'm done.  Certainly, I'll release it in some fashion.  In what format, I don't know.  Certainly, only one story won't be worth putting out a hard copy, but somehow, this story will get out there.

But one of the things I do know for certain is that releasing the book has really jazzed me up, creatively.  I spent much of the last couple years languishing, not really sure what direction to go in with anything.  I'd been trying to get out my graphic novel, but the progress on that is almost nonexistent, with only about a dozen pages penciled in two years.  At that rate, it may never get finished.  I've given some thought to simply writing it as a novel, which seems far more doable considering the experience I've just had with "Show Me the End of the World." 

And that feels good.

Current TV:
"Stargate SG-1" Season Four (DVD)

'Show Me the End of the World' now in paperback!

It's here!  It's happening!  The paperback version of my first self-published book, "Show Me the End of the World," is now available from Amazon.com!  The paperback version is a nice, trade paperback sized volume.  I'm very happy with the physical quality of the book, and I hope everyone else out there is, too.

You can order it here, and please feel free to rate and review it when you're done reading!

You can also check out a free sample here.

Enjoy!

Free sample of 'Show Me the End of the World'

Today I have decided to begin offering a free PDF download of one of the stories in my first book, "Show Me the End of the World," which is available now for your Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook and (almost) in paperback!

So please feel free to download and check out one of the stories, and if you like it, try the full book and tell all your friends and family!

Check out the free sample

And be sure to tell me what you think in the comments below!

It feels so... REAL

The proof came in for the paperback version of 'Show Me the End of the World.'  I have to admit, I was a little apprehensive... and even somewhat worried.  Firstly, what if the quality of the book was low?

Secondly... I have to be honest and say that initially I had not planned on releasing a paperback version at all.  I didn't want to.  But enough people said that they simply didn't want to read the ebook version that I felt compelled to offer the paperback.  Begrudgingly, I spent a few nights formatting it.  It was... less fun. 

I had some trouble with the formatting, specifically because I had simply copied the wrong margin sizes from the site, which was frustrating.  Ultimately, though, I finished it, submitted it and just sort of hoped for the best.

But when I actually held it in my hands...

...It's possible I giggled.

I felt the same rush I got when I'd received my first copy of 'Strange New Worlds' back in 2006.  So I guess, despite my initial reservations, I'm proud of it.  It feels good holding it in my hand and seeing my name on the cover. 

Current Movie:
"Quantum of Solace" (2008)